Will Coronavirus Crash the Internet? – Popular Mechanics

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A Coronavirus Crash?

The move to working from home during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is, without a doubt, the best public health decision people could have made. But our new reality has led to many questions, like whether or not the sudden move to remote work will crash the internet. This is where hardware comes into play rather than pure bandwidth. Many workers from places with intranets and direct ethernet links to business-grade bandwidth still need the same complex tools and are now tapping into them remotely.

It’s this shift from corporate networks to consumer equipment where any breakdowns will occur, according to Harvard technology policy and computer science professor Jim Waldo.

“At Harvard, we have a fairly sophisticated network,” Waldo told the university’s Gazette. “That keeps a lot of the traffic that is being sent from Harvard inside its network, where we know what the bandwidth constraints are, we know how many switches it’s going to be going through. Now that everybody is at home—and home may be anywhere from Boston to China for some of our students—it is going via a much more complicated route and a much more varied set of equipment, and that’s going to stress everything.”

Waldo says the internet’s ability to scale up and keep up is the real marvel here, and certainly people’s real usage has backed that up. In October, Popular Mechanics looked at the homepages of newspapers between the late ‘90s and now, and the sites are anywhere from about 30 to 50 times larger now before you count high-resolution images or streaming video. Each new development online, from simple things like multimedia at all or the ability to use outside fonts and scripts, added to the per-page burden on everyone’s connections.

More importantly, as Waldo points out, the internet was made to cut corners and seamlessly cover errors. If one domain server is out, your request goes to another. Our data is passed back and forth in a container called a packet, and packet loss is part of what networks are designed to tolerate. Even the idea of a packet is a way to minimize errors with clever design. Streaming video is one of the most fault-tolerant, with long buffers and video-quality sliders that adjust automatically to your connection.

While much is being made of the announced bandwidth limiting of Netflix and other streaming services, the quality of life reduction won’t be much. European Union officials asked for this change based on concerns and feedback, and the guess is what’s driving that isn’t people who live in cities with robust internet infrastructure—it’s those in rural areas with less reliable internet and fewer failsafes if something does happen to it.

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In the U.S., nearly 7 percent of people, almost all of them in rural places, use reliable but rigidly capped satellite internet. Another nearly 15 percent have no formal internet access, instead using mobile networks or public WiFi spots, or simply going without. Now, public libraries in many areas are closed, taking away a place where underserved people could use high-speed internet. Businesses, and their public WiFi networks, are closed. Kids used to using computers in schools may not have computers at home.

All that is to say, the overall idea of bandwidth isn’t threatened by an increase in users. Instead, it’s what Waldo calls the last 100 yards: a reduction in places people usually use internet, pushing them to instead rely on phones.

Workers are streaming meetings and pushing large files back and forth that would usually be on an intranet. Capping Netflix for a month just puts more wiggle room in the hands of people whose less reliable networks might need it the most.